I don’t have enough time in a day to get things done. You don’t have enough time either. Let’s face it, we are all trying to do too much with too little time at our disposal. This only leads to stress which leads to us being grouchy – oh yes, you are grouchy – and it gives us that helpless, hopeless feeling of always being behind. 

I, naturally, have the answer.  I did not find it in therapy or from spiritualism or any intellectual pursuits (not that I really pursue anything intellectual). No, I found it in the world of marketing and big corporations. I found it in a company like Kentucky Fried Chicken that became KFC not for their own selfish reasons like the fact that the word “fried” carries such horrible connotations for the health of its eaters and not to decrease their costs on signage.  They did it for us. They know that we are so busy and that by shortening up how long it takes to say their name they are giving us the gift of time and really, corporations are all about the gift giving.  Nearly equal props to cereals like SUGAR Frosted Flakes that have shortened things up just to save us time in speaking their revered name.  So how do we take this and learn from it?  I, as an innovator, am adopting the KFC strategy in my own life and I am working to shorten many of the phrases I commonly speak to simple abbreviations.  I would urge you to do the same.  As always I will provide examples from my life that you may steal or add to those you come up with yourself. I trust you will do the work.  Here goes: 

AFLAC – Avoid Fowl-Life at All Cost 

DIMWEED – Don’t Ignore Me Wonderful Excellent Employee Dude (I often utter this to counter people who I seem to be inconveniencing by my presence) 

NERD – Neato Entertaining Rad Dad (It’s how my kids see me!) 

ARTERY – Always Really Try to Eat Red-meat. Yummy! (Hey they can’t all be winners) 

STINKY – Smokers, Thankful I’m Not Kissing You

Timeout; non-smokers please turn away.  Smokers, you just have to quit. I know quitting is brutally hard, physically and mentally, but having your life shortened is brutally harder. Please.

MILEY – Music Inappropriate for Little Eager Youths 

SUNNY – Sorry U Numb Northern Yanks! 

DISCOMBOBULATED – Delightful Insightful Soul Cheering Ointment My Blog Offers Because U are Loved And Totally and Excellently Dreamy

Wow, that last one was tough.  Anyway, you get the idea.  My timeline is such that I plan on being at about 50% of my speaking being abbreviated like this by spring.  Please don’t slow me down by still insisting on uttering full phrases and sentences to me.  I beg you to shorten things up.  

No blog next week, Blogger’s Union Rules have made next Friday a mandatory Holiday.  

Please note I did not once mention in today’s blog that I am an entertainer with a recently released album. Oh, Dang-it! (Club up!) 

Let the turtle fly… 

Tracey Singer

www.traceysinger.com

Fear.

Just the mention of the word fear brings fear. Webster’s Dictionary defines fear as… OK, semi-inside joke. My eyes could not possibly roll in a wider loop than when somebody gives a dictionary definition to start off any writing or speech. Puh-leez. We all know what fear is and we have all experienced it. Some people, maybe all people to a certain extent, get a rush from fear. Why else would we ride roller coasters, parachute out of airplanes, visit haunted houses or go to dentists?  Fear can be fun.  

When I was 7 years old I went to see my first Horror Movie, 2 actually. Kids under 30 let me explain that back in the days of  old you got to see 2 movies – double the laughs, double the tears, double the joy, double the sticky candy covered floor – for the price of one. Those were the days of Camelot. I went with my 2 older brothers to the Jerry Lewis (yes, that guy) Cinema to see the classic low budget combo of “The Boy Who Cried Werewolf” and “Sssssss.” Go ahead and google if you must, I’ll wait. The latter starred Dirk Benedict of “Battlestar Galactica” fame and Heather Menzies, Louisa from “The Sound of Music.” Louisa was my 2^nd SOM crush after Brigitta and before Liesl. What can I say; I got older but they did not. Back to the Horror Movie – I loved it! Edge of my seat, nightmares for several nights after and I loved it! After that I discovered the Hammer Horror vampire movies with Christopher Lee. More nightmares. Plus I would lie awake half the night, shaking under my covers, waiting for the safety of sunlight to appear. I loved it! That and all the horror movies that followed, from Japanese Giant Monster Movies to Slasher Flicks and all stops along the way. I loved it all. With kids now I don’t get the chance to watch much (although I did once attempt to watch “Wolf,” starring Jack Nicholson, with my son who was 2 at the time in the room. I thought that since my son was playing with his toys he wouldn’t notice, that is until Jack let out a predictable howl toward the end of the movie and then my son turned to me and with equal skill let out a giant, not-predicted howl that matched Jack’s spot-on. Luckily he did not show this talent to my wife when she got home. I hope she doesn’t read these blogs).  Bottom line is that, at an age more appropriate than 2 (or even 7 as my wife would point out) we seem to love being frightened.  That’s good fear. 

Then there is bad fear. Bad fear is the fear we do not welcome, the fear that makes us shudder.  We men are trained not to show fear, in fact most men will not even admit to their fears at all, even men who are non-licensed non-therapists. Your typical “real” therapist will hover over you while you lay on his or her couch (oh you didn’t think it was about comfort did you? It’s all about the lording) and you will never hear said therapist talk about any weakness or fear they have. I am not your typical therapist, not only because of my lack of a Psychology Degree or state approved license or knowledge or experience, but also because I am willing to show you that there are things that scare the bejonkers out of me. Really, I am quite sure I have no bejonkers left because they have been replaced by one thing; F-E-A-R (just in case you are looking it up in Webster’s).  These are my fears. You may choose to mock them but that will not change anything, for they are personal to me and me alone: 

• I fear that the geese who often hiss at me when I run at the lake are just toying with me and are planning an all-out pecking assault on me.  Darn you large birds.
• I fear that the return to network television with new episodes for Gilligan’s Island that I have been waiting for all my life may face a few hurdles considering most of the cast is no longer living. 
• I fear that I will wake up tomorrow and it will have all been a dream and Hillary Clinton will really be the president. 
• But then I will really awaken from that dream to find out that George W. Bush is still president and will be forever. 

                  OK, time for another explanation. This is not going to be a political blog so I couldn’t skewer (oh yes, it was a skewering) the democrats without also burning the republicans.  So another rule of this blog is that when I debit one side with a slam I will credit the other (3 semesters of accounting baby) with an equal slam. I guess the democrats should be on the credit side since President Obama is running it up faster than anybody in history. Oh geez, uh Newt Gingrich is far too heartless to be president in 2012. Square again.

• I fear that the try-out I have been putting off with the Padres may be a little tougher now that I am getting a bit older.  Then again they have been steadily dropping closer to my level of play each of the last few years so I might give it a little more time and see what happens.
• I fear that one day 9 foot tall space aliens will come to earth with the promise of peace and the creation of a better world for us and they will read from a book that our experts will, after painstaking work, translate the title to be “To Serve Man” and everyone will breathe a sigh of relief because it looks like they really are here to help us and they’ll even arrange flights on their spaceships to their planet until finally someone is able to translate the rest of the book and discover that To Serve Man is really a cook book!  Oh no wait, that was just a Twilight Zone episode. 
• I fear that my album, “Sweets ‘n’ Treats” (Club up!) will fall short of the million CDs I want to sell because not enough people will pony up 15 tiny dollars to treat their kids to a life-changing musical experience that they will cherish for years or , hey, even if you don’t have kids it’s a cheap (yet thoughtful) Christmas present for, say, 10 of your closest friends and relatives or heck, just buy it out of pity sake for the guy whose labor of love brought about the album’s creation. www.traceysinger.com (Club up!) 
• I fear that someday, when items 16, 17, 18 and so on cross the scanner at the 15 items or FEWER line (It’s fewer, not less, can’t they get it right?) with the person in front of me still pulling items out of their cart while the checker just smiles at them, well I may just not be able to control myself and I may start screaming “SIXTEEN, SEVENTEEN, EIGHTEEN, NINETEEN, TWENTY!!!!!!!!!!!” Hey, I need to add that one to my LIP for 12-20-12! I wonder if a megaphone would be overkill… 
• I fear that the Anti-Drug DVD I just bought for my kids starring Andre Agassi and Jodi Sweetin may end up coming back to haunt me. 
• I fear being trapped on a small island with Rush Limbaugh. Shoot, um, thinking, um, thinking, thinking…can’t name even 1 liberal radio host since none has ever been successful.  Oh, I guess I just took care of the problem. Even Steven! 
• I fear that if I hear yet another person misuse the word “literally” I may literally explode with anger.  
• Finally, I fear that if I don’t pass the final inspection and if hell is indeed personalized, I will spend eternity sitting in my car in a parking garage behind drivers who will not move faster than a crawl, snow falling on my head, radio forever stuck on a rotation of Country, Rap, and Tweenie-Girl Pop. There’ll probably be a giant rooster pecking at the back of my neck too. 

Now let me calm one of your fears. Many of you have told me that you have not commented because you are worried that what you have to say will not be clever enough.  Let me take away the pressure by saying that if you did come up with something really clever I would just have to delete it anyway to eliminate any competition.  Dear readers don’t you know that your comments should only be written with the intent of stroking the blogger’s egg-shell fragile ego?  We should all strive to do that, now, shouldn’t we. 

Happy Halloween.  Embrace the fear.  Stay away from large birds – they are Evil.

Let the turtle fly… 

Tracey Singer

www.traceysinger.com (Club up!)

Hi, I’m Tracey Singer, husband, father, and your new best friend and life-coach as you head into each weekend.  Every Friday afternoon, when frankly nobody is working and people are desperately looking for ways to pass time, you will have the comfort of knowing that I am here to impart my wisdom and great vision to undo all the yucky stuff with which the workweek, or for you stay-at-homers, homeweek has polluted your otherwise glistening soul. Or, maybe it is just therapy for me, or rather I, who spend my week creating and marketing music for children while being surrounded at any given time by 2 to 4 of my own sweet little ones (kids that is).  Ironic isn’t it? Could it be, could it just be, that I need some sort of outlet, ANY OUTLET, to express an occasional ADULT THOUGHT?!?!?!?!?  Maybe so. Maybe so. Maybe you and I will both be the co-beneficiaries of this little session.  It’s a win-win.  So sit back, relax, pretend to be working when your boss comes in, and feel the stress start to peel away as if you are getting your own personal e-facial.

Now I think for any mutually beneficial therapy session to be effective there must be a deep trust, understanding and level of comfort with the provider of said therapy – namely me.  Today I would simply like to give you some insight to who I am. Oh, I’ve already given you the basics – now I am talking about the real things that “make me tick.”  So here goes:

• Although I have a formal education in music, most of what I know of classical music I have learned from Bugs Bunny cartoons.
• I believe that any driver who, upon reaching an intersection, realizes that he or she is in the right lane but needs to turn left and instead of going an extra block and making a U-turn chooses to block 3 lanes of traffic trying to move over, preventing good and innocent persons like myself from proceeding in a timely fashion, well I believe that person should have a scarlet LB for Lane Blocker stamped on their car and should have to face the lifetime of humiliation that would of course follow.
• I detest winter and I make no secret of that. However, this is hard to admit because I am so ashamed, but every afternoon at 4:00 I take out a can of Aqua Net, step into my backyard, tilt my upper body back at a 90 degree angle and I let fly. 
• If you tell me your homemade macaroni and cheese is the best I will smile politely at you while knowing, even without tasting it, that it is not as good as Kraft.
• I think all people on the extreme right and the extreme left should be thrown together in a designated city, A la “Escape From New York,” and just left to scream rhetoric at each other while the rest of us get something done. Oh, we’ll feed them and all.
• I would have been a professional athlete but for a very political sports machine that keeps down guys like me who are too small, too slow, not coordinated enough, and easily breakable.

I think this is enough to get us started.  I look forward to our first full session next week. Until then – try to get through the next 7 suns and moons and know that better days lie ahead.  If you get really bored visit www.traceysinger.com.